Saturday, 29 March 2014

Not much happening chaps and chapettes, kidney stones laid me low for a short while and looking after my ol' grandma has taken up a bit of my time. Had a bit of a session on the brushes again in between phantom kidney pains, no kidding everytime I got even the slightest tweak I was diving for the swear jar and expecting the worse. Those of you in the know know what I'm talking of..... those of you that dont, well lets just say your in for a rude shock if you get the stones!

Saturday, 22 February 2014

While waiting for glue/paint/some such to dry on some basing work I have been focused on of late I let my mind wander to painting one of my woodland Indians for official "2014 project yet to be numbered" FIW theme using Muskets and Thomashawks. These chaps are periphery figures meaning they are primed, situated for painting, on the desk but not currently front of house as far as painting is concerned. I have two of these "projects in waiting" ready for some change of pace ,should it be needed, whilst the focus project requires some breathing room.

OK well that explains the Huron bit, but what is this label me stupid? Well for the second time in 12 months I have painted a figure in metallic paint instead of what I believed was a tan colour, both in the wee hours, the first time on a horse. Because of the nature of those frosted plastic dropper bottles the metallic element wasn't apparent and I picked up the wrong bottle based on the colour not bothering to look at the label, derr. It was a lesson well learnt and not, or not likely, to be repeated until last night what makes last nights little blunder so galling is that I did read the label of the bottle yet did not connect the dots so to speak.

So how did the faux par come to pass if I was on my game (if you can call someone painting at 2am as being on their game), well quite simply I hadn't realised the need for a gold metallic wash! Still don't. I recently bought a job lot of Secret Weapon washes to try out and thought the "Golden Brown Wash" glazed would give a nice rich hue to my lil Huron Indians flesh, unfortunately "Golden Brown Wash" is a nice golden brown hue with gold flake in it and of course being a wash it is thinly distributed and not at all noticeable until you examine the recipient of said "Golden Brown Wash" the next morning in sunlight, even then it reads as something disturbing is going on but not plainly apparent.

Who in their right minds needs this wash, aaaargh, if it is used as a wash and not a glaze it will pool in the crevices as it should and distribute it's piffling amount of metal flake in said crevices, as it should, who, what, why and when is all I could think whilst repainting the flesh for another crack and suspecting a conspiracy. I now rate it as the most useless paint/wash/ink/medium out there and lordy I have come across a few I can tell you, it was all an evil plot I tells ya.

Anywho This is what I have come up with so far, just need to do a bit more research before I tackle the hair and warpaint. Damn nice figure too, very neatly sculptured.

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Nothing much other than a break from the paints and an excuse to blog off with a few photo's, helps with momentum...

The new plan was to finish off the triari this week and they were duly separated into two groups muscle cuirass and the plate style armour, but as is more often the case than not things went pear shaped. Simply put I spent waaaay too long painting one night, wandered
off from the paint bench with the balance of the little beggars in a sleep deprived daze and now cant find them anywhere! As they can not be located plans changed, instead I decided to work on some more of the command figures and the velites.

The only problem, if you can call it that, with this ancients lark is painting the much larger areas of flesh, much more than I would normally find on 18th-19thC figures. Spending the time on arms and legs in the style I would normally paint faces alone was getting time consuming and a little annoying. I think I have found a fast and simple solution for painting flesh that will pass muster and relies on blocking in solid colour followed by some simple wash and glazing, nothing earth shattering there I know but it something different for me.

I'm trying to keep the flesh darker than I normally would to reflect a Southern Mediterranean peoples and of course they are soldiers that spend most of their time out of doors and see plenty of sun. I also mucked around with some muted colour for the tunics to break up the off white tones that I will be using for the bulk of the army, maybe some edge borders will give a sense of slight irregularity to the outfits as well.

My last trick for this week was to do a bit of conversion work or as I called it "green stuffing about", once again this was simply to add some variety and I'll admit I have been pretty keen to give it a go for some time. So, sucking it up like a good little princess I mixed up my green stuff, took a deep breath and with some tiny idea of what I wanted to do slapped that stuff right on there, it obviously not totally convincing but it was a reasonable start. Now that the first conversion is out of the way, and nothing cataclysmic befell Paintpig Towers in the process, I'll be looking for an opportunity to have another crack at green stuffing.

I will definitely need to plan the next conversion a little better, sketch out what I want to do, and make sure it is clear in my head. I will also need to modify my tools a little although on the surface they look right I found that in reality they are for the most part too big, you really do need some tiny shapers, itsy bitsy tiny! The clasp on the cloak for instance started as a ball of green stuff about the same diametre as a pin head and I had nothing that neatly fitted into the folds on the back of the cloak to smooth it out properly, lessons learnt the hard way are lessons well learnt and not soon forgotten.